Monthly Archives: January 2012

This is one of the best pop tunes from it’s era, with a theme that has some resonance to a synaesthete such as myself. This song is a studio recording from before the age of music videos, so there is no clip, but for me the photo used as a visual is interesting because the beautiful Petula Clark has an uncanny resemblance to two women who I’ve known. Both of these women are unusually feminine women but paradoxically wore or wear their hair short just like Petula did in her heyday, presumably because nature thought it fit to give some very feminine women very heavy jaw-lines. A jaw of that type in combination with prominent cheek-bones would no doubt look masculine or witch-like next to long hair. Why does nature do these things? I don’t know.

This brief article is fully available free online, (which is great), so there’s no point me going over it as you can read it if you wish. This new technique in face recognition technology is different to the existing techniques that are based on the face as a whole. How these man-made technologies compare to natural human face recognition I’m not sure. I wonder whether the human brain actually uses a number of different approaches to face recognition?

This is a quote from Dr Julia Simner’s thought-provoking paper in the British Journal of Psychology about defining synaesthesia:

“To avoid this circular evidence of what synaesthesia is and is not, we might instead define synaesthesia in terms of it neurological basis, and then allow ourselves to consider what types of variants this synaesthesia might then include. If indeed the condition were defined by inherited atypical cross-talk, we might find synaesthesiae in unexpected places. For example, if an inherited predisposition for neurological hyper-association manifested itself, say, in the fronto-temporal language regions that mediate semantics, lexical-forms, and syntax (e.g., see Tyler & Marslen-Wilson, 2008, for review) what would this mean? It might mean we could find ‘synaesthetic’ individuals with unusually strengthened connections in spoken language processing.”

I happened across this picture that is apparently from The Human Connectome Project, or at least from a paper by Liza Gross that was published in PLoS Biology in 2008: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/the-human-connectome/3706910 I’m guessing that the coloured larger blobs represent the most connected hubs in the brain, and I’m guessing these bits would be made of white matter? I know that there is one type of synaesthesia that is associated with some kind of functional enhancement of white matter, and in general, synaesthesia is thought to be due to hyperconnectivity in the brain, which I guess might mean that it operates the most in regions of the brain that are the most connected? Well, looking at the picture with the red and pink blobs, it seems as though the parts of the brain that are the most connected are towards the rear of the brain, maybe the parietal, occipital and part of the temporal lobes, with most of the frontal lobe and Broca’s area (important in language processing) left pretty much out of the loop. So I’ve got to wonder how realistic is Dr Simner’s theoretical idea of a type of person who is especially articulate due to a hidden type of synaesthesia based in the “fronto-temporal language regions”. I certainly do think it is probable that there are non-obvious and undiscovered types of synaesthesia linking brain functions that researchers haven’t already known to be hyperconnected, but I suspect that researchers will also find that synaesthesia is more likely in some regions of the brain than others. I’ve long ago noticed that most types of synaesthesia that are known to science (and to me) involve the sense of sight in one way or another (scenes, colours, shapes, faces, visual-spatial landscapes etc), and where is vision processed in the brain? At the rear, where so many of those red blobs are found.

Thank you British Journal of Psychology. I find this stuff interesting. I hope my horribly neglected readers will also find the February 2012 issue interesting. It has Dr Julia Simner’s most interesting paper and two papers in response to it, one by the leading US synesthesia researcher David Eagleman and and another by synaesthesia researchers Cohen Kadosh and Terhune, plus Simner’s response to the responses. So if you still think synaesthesia is just crossed senses, do take a look.

For those of us with an interest in face recognition as well as synaesthesia, there is also a free paper titled “Integration of faces and voices, but not faces and names, in person recognition”. Happy reading!

It looks like the super-recognizer study held at the Science Museum in London is still going, but scheduled to wind up soon. I believe the researchers from the University of East London hope to find study participants who are superrecognizers, so if you are in that area and suspect that you might be one, you might want to make inquiries.